Zainah Anwar

Zainah Anwar (Malaysia)

Setting the Qur'anic Record Straight

Advocating women's rights based on the teachings of the Qur'an may seem like a recipe for disaster to some.

But for Malaysia's leading feminist, the sacred text of Islam is far from a source of repression – it is her most powerful asset.

Zainah Anwar has long argued that Muslim practices oppressive to women are a perversion of the true word of God, instigated by men intent on maintaining their privileged position in society. "I'm outraged that my religion is distorted and used to justify patriarchy and the discrimination and oppression of women," she says.

With revisionist mullahs resurgent in Muslim politics around the world, the stakes for strengthening a feminist discourse that can protect women's rights are high. By locating the ideological basis for sexual equality within the same religious fountainhead that inspires Islamic chauvinism, Ms. Zainah cannot easily be dismissed as just another Western-inspired radical with little relevance to local culture.

She was raised in a moderate Muslim environment that emphasized equality between the sexes and was shocked to find that fundamentalist imams thought of women as little more than helpmates with no identity outside of an appendage to their husbands, brothers, or fathers. "To become an adult and be confronted with a religion that is contradictory to my understanding and practice of religion, that totally contradicts what I believe in a just God and a just Islam, was outrageous to me," she says.

So Ms. Zainah decided to do something about it. She set up in 1988 a group called Sisters in Islam (SIS), which petitions the government to reform sexist laws, organizes national and transnational conferences, runs training programs and a legal clinic for women, and comments on topical issues in the local press between three and four times a week. Its methodology? Revisiting the original teachings of the Qur'an to show that there is no basis in Islam for viewing women as inferior to men.

"Sisters in Islam is performing a very vital function in educating women about their basic rights," says Asma Barlas, an expert on comparative politics, Islamic texts, and gender at Ithaca College. "People like Ms. Zainah are trying to get Muslim women to rethink their relationship to religion in an idiom that is relevant to them," she says.

The problem of socially repressive Islamic revisionism is not new in Malaysia. Although the West has only recently discovered the trend, political Islamism first began in the 1970s and 1980s partly as a reaction to changing social structures associated with modernization. More women were starting to receive higher education and becoming economically independent, and this liberalization sparked a reactionary backlash from religious leaders who saw their authority waning.

Malaysia always has been considered a moderate Islamic society due to its social diversity. But once the political streak began to take hold in local mosques, "it negated this pluralism … and instead imposed on us a very alien understanding and practice of Islam that we feel do not serve the best interests of this plural country," says Ms. Zainah. "A bunch of us decided that it's really important to find out whether our religion is oppressive toward women, because that's not how we've been brought up to understand Islam."

Rather than adopting alien concepts of feminism from the West, SIS bases its message of equality on the original teachings of the Qur'an. The group runs study sessions on the holy text pointing out the many passages that support an equal role for men and women in Muslim society.

"In Islam, everyone is treated equally, and no one comes before the other, and certainly nobody comes from anybody's broken rib. Creation is always spoken of in the Qur'an in terms of pairs – both are created equal and both are created at the same time, and one is not the derivative of the other," she says.

While SIS has a high profile in Malaysia, the group also has growing international clout due to its role in creating transnational networks on women's rights. "They are at the forefront of study not just in their own country but also within Muslim majority society in looking at how we define the role of women vis-à-vis Islam," says Rakhee Goyal, executive director of the Women's Learning Partnership, a U.S.-based non-governmental organization that works with Muslim women abroad.

SIS has recently collaborated with activists from the Maghreb on the issue of reforming family law in Muslim nations, for instance. This work steps outside of the normal focus on religious law to include arguments based on sociological concepts, human rights, and legal and constitutional law. SIS is using the model of regional cooperation taking shape in the Maghreb to put together a coalition of Indonesian, Filipino, Singaporean, and Malaysian activists working on women's rights within an Islamic context in Southeast Asia.

"There is a whole diversity of opinions, a diversity of interpretation, a diversity of laws – this rich diversity that is part of the Muslim heritage provides us with an incredibly rich source of information, scholarship, and opinion that we can work with to promote our belief in an Islam that upholds the principles of justice and equality, of freedom and dignity," says Ms. Zainah.

But the battle remains an uphill one. Islamic law has recently helped underpin efforts in Malaysia to thwart domestic violence legislation, restrict women's property rights, and make polygamy and divorce easier for men. Despite many women being more highly educated than men and financially independent, women are increasingly being told that they are inferior.

Such statements fly in the face of reality and present Malaysian women with a dilemma in terms of how they relate to their faith, says Ms. Zainah. "The choice before us is: Do we accept what these kinds of mullahs are saying, or if we want to be a feminist, do we then reject our religion?" she asks. "For us, that is not a choice. Rejecting our religion in order to become a feminist is just not a choice. We want to be feminists, and we want to be Muslim as well."

One thing SIS does not want to be is too closely associated with Western ideals or organizations. There is a tendency in the United States, for example, to try to promote the views of moderate Muslim groups in an effort to counter the influence of more radical organizations. But overt support by Western groups is actually counterproductive because it undermines the local authenticity of moderate movements in the eyes of the public, says Ms. Zainah.

Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation produced a monograph called Building Moderate Muslim Networks that mentioned SIS in a positive light. Ms. Zainah says the report, while well-intentioned, was both shortsighted and unwelcome. "That (kind of support) doesn't help because those who are not familiar with our work see us as the kind of group that the West wants to develop in Muslim countries. We are not a product of the West; we are a product of our own society and the challenges that we face within our own society," she says.

Campaigns in Muslim nations to promote women's rights run a real risk of being de-legitimized as "Western-inspired movements about bra-burning, topless people that we have no understanding of and are not at all rooted in local culture," says Ms. Goyal.

Other experts on the topic agree. "Being too closely associated with the West can be a kiss of death to groups operating in the Muslim world," says professor Barlas. Trust among the local population can easily be lost, and in the worst-case scenario, groups can become the target of political repression. "This is particularly evident in Iran right now," she says.

Rather than picking and choosing the "good Muslims" from the "bad Muslims," Ms. Zainah says one way for the West to play a productive role is to encourage comprehensive scholarly inquiry into the Islamic canon by developing stronger transnational links between universities. She says some of the best work by Muslim scholars is occurring at colleges in the United States and Europe, and these researchers need to be given a platform to speak in places like Malaysia where moderate Islam is under threat. "The scholarship that is emerging in the West now is extremely important, and to expose that scholarship, that new thinking, to Muslims in Muslim countries is important."

The key to protecting women's rights and other civil liberties in the face of a defensive and hostile Islamic establishment is being able to preserve a public space for all voices to be heard. The United States and Europe often criticize nations such as Malaysia for backsliding on basic rights, but "it's a bit rich for Western governments to expect Islam to be democratic, to respect fundamental liberties within a political context that is not democratic but despotic," she says. "Without that democratic space, you cannot have a democratic Islam, you cannot have an Islam that recognizes justice and equality and freedom and dignity."

Updated August 2007